Physician Suicide Rates, Need I Say More???

September 19, 2011

Folks,

Was browsing thru the listings at "'s" this morning when I came across this article which is near and dear to my heart. Personally as a one step removed intimately involved doer and observer, I am sick and tired of watching Helplessly as I see more and more good men and women suffer and pay the price, sometimes in cases such as these, the Ultimate Price while other Stakeholders profit mightly at their expense... And some backwards old fashioned Indentured Servitude like system of post graduate clinical training continues to destroy some of our best and brightest, and probably not leaving almost any of you untouched or undamaged....

Another form of PTSD imposed upon a group of people in the name of their Own Good.... And then we sit back and wonder, Why are Doctors so removed and impersonal??? We get the exact types of doctors that our present system has pre-screened for in undergraduate school adminisions and MCAT testing, interviews, and med school and residency training and weeding out systems have created.... IMHO, it is amazing how many of you folks still manage to come out half sane and still basically well adjusted with the majority of your personal value systems still intact... I'm sometimes blown away that more of you don't come out blantantly more harmed, scarred and dysfunctional... Although these articles seem to be suggesting that such scars lie just below the surface if one only cares to try to peel back the first layer or two and

actually take a proper look... And as a person with a very Psychological twist and perspective, I remind you to always take into consideration the inherent variability of "Self-Reporting" without some sort of secondary pressuring mechanism towards complete honesty like the "Bogus Pipeline"... Such sharing of painful and potentially harmful to self or career facts even in fairly "annomous" surveys and other forms of self reporting tend to get lower rates of positive admission to such problems and issues than are actually present in the population being suveyed and measured... So when the report speaks to 1 in 16 surgeons reported having suicidal thoughts in the past year, those numbers are almost certainly a decent although hard if not impossible to quantify higher than the survey shows....

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/09/doctors-suffer-burnout-ultimate-tragedy-suicide.html

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2811%2960145-1/fulltext?elsca1=TL-040211 & elsca2=email & elsca3=segment

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/reprint/161/12/2295

Enjoy???? Read 'em and Weap..... You folks deserve something so much different and so much better than all of this, that's for sure....